Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
Routine, here again, turns beauty care and wardrobe maintenance into chores. The horror of degradation that all living change involves in some cold or frustrated women arouses a horror of life itself: they seek to preserve themselves as others preserve furniture or jam; this negative stubbornness makes them enemies of their own existence and hostile to others: good meals damage their figures, wine spoils their complexions, smiling too much gives you wrinkles, the sun hurts the skin, rest makes you lethargic, work wears you out, love gives you circles under your eyes, kisses make your cheeks red, caresses deform your breasts, embraces shrivel the flesh, pregnancies disfigure your face and body; you know how young mothers angrily push away the child marveling at their ball gown. “Don’t touch me, your hands are all sticky, you’re going to get me dirty”; the appearance-conscious rejects her husband’s or lover’s ardor with the same rebuffs. Just as one covers furniture with loose covers, she would like to withdraw from men, the world, time. But none of these precautions prevents the appearance of gray hair and crow’s-feet. Starting from youth, woman knows this destiny is inevitable. And, regardless of her vigilance, she is a victim of accidents: a drop of wine falls on her dress, a cigarette
burns it; and so the creature of luxury and parties who smilingly struts about the living room disappears: she turns into the serious and hard housewife; suddenly one discovers that her toilette was not a bouquet of flowers, fireworks, a gratuitous and perishable splendor destined to generously light up an instant: it is an asset, capital, an investment, it demands sacrifices; its loss is an irreparable disaster. Stains, holes, dresses that are failures, and ruined perms are far more serious catastrophes than a burned roast or a broken vase: because the coquettish woman is not only alienated in things, she wants to be a thing, and without an intermediary she feels insecure in the world. The relations she maintains with her dressmaker and milliner, her impatience, her demands, are manifestations of her seriousness and insecurity. A successful dress creates in her the character of her dreams; but in a soiled, ruined outfit, she feels demeaned.
Marie Bashkirtseff writes: “My mood, my manners, the expression on my face, everything depended on my dress.” And then: “Either you have to go around naked, or you have to dress according to your body, taste, and character. When they are not right, I feel gauche, common, and therefore humiliated. What happens to the mood and mind? They think about clothes and so one becomes stupid, boring, and one does not know what to do with oneself.”
Many women prefer to miss a party than go badly dressed, even if they are not going to be noticed.
However, although some women affirm “I dress for myself only,” we have seen that even in narcissism the gaze of the other is involved. Only in asylums do the fashion-conscious stubbornly keep their faith in absent gazes; normally, they demand witnesses. After ten years of marriage, Sophia Tolstoy writes:
I want people to admire me and say how pretty I am, and I want Lyova to see and hear them too … I hate people who tell me I am beautiful. I never believed them … what would be the point of it? My darling little Petya loves his old nanny just as much as he would love a great beauty … I am having my hair curled today, and have been happily imagining how nice it will look, even though nobody will see me and it is quite unnecessary. I adore ribbons, and I would like a new leather belt—and now I have written this I feel like crying.
Husbands do not perform this role well. Here again the husband’s demands are duplicitous. If his wife is too attractive, he becomes jealous;
but every husband is more or less King Candaules; he wants his wife to make him proud; for her to be elegant, pretty, or at least “presentable”; if not, he will humorously tell her these words of Pére Ubu: “You are quite ugly today! Is it because we are expecting company?” In marriage, as we have seen, erotic and social values are not very compatible; such antagonism is reflected in this situation. The wife who accentuates her sexual attraction is considered vulgar in her husband’s eyes; he criticizes this boldness that would seduce him in an unknown woman, and this criticism kills all desire for her; if his wife dresses decently, he approves but coldly: he does not find her attractive and vaguely reproaches her for it. Because of that, he rarely looks at her on his own account: he inspects her through the eyes of others. “What will they say about her?” He does not see clearly because he projects his spousal point of view onto others. Nothing is more irritating for a woman than to see him appreciate in another the dresses or way of dressing he criticizes in her. Naturally, of course, he is too close to her to see her; her face is immutable for him; nor does he notice her outfits or hairstyle. Even a husband in love or an infatuated lover is often indifferent to a woman’s clothes. If they love her ardently in her nudity, the most attractive adornments merely disguise her; and they will cherish her whether badly dressed, tired, or dazzling. If they no longer love her, the most flattering dresses will be of no avail. Clothes can be an instrument of conquest but not a weapon of defense; their art is to create mirages, they offer the viewer an imaginary object: in the erotic embrace and in daily relations mirages fade; conjugal feelings like physical love exist in the realm of reality. Women do not dress for the loved man. Dorothy Parker, in one of her short stories, describes a young woman who, waiting impatiently for her husband, who is on leave, decides to make herself beautiful to welcome him:
She bought a new dress; black—he liked black dresses—simple—he liked plain dresses—and so expensive that she would not think of its price …
“Do you … like my dress?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I always liked that dress on you.”
It was as if she turned to wood. “This dress,” she said, enunciating with insulting distinctness, “is brand new. I have never had it on before in my life. In case you are interested, I bought it especially for this occasion.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “Oh, sure, now I see it’s not the other one at all. I think it’s great. I like you in black.”
“At moments like this,” she said, “I almost wish I were in it for another reason.”
8
It is often said that women dress to arouse jealousy in other women: this jealousy is really a clear sign of success; but this is not its only aim. Through envious or admiring approbation, woman seeks an absolute affirmation of her beauty, her elegance, her taste: of herself. She dresses to display herself; she displays herself to make herself be. She thus submits herself to a painful dependence; the housewife’s devotion is useful even if it is not recognized; the effort of the fashion-conscious woman is in vain unless consciousness is involved. She is looking for a definitive valorization of herself; it is this attempt at the absolute that makes her quest so exhausting; criticized by only one voice—this hat
is
not beautiful—she is flattered by a compliment, but a contradiction demolishes her; and as the absolute only manifests itself in an indefinite series of appearances, she will never have entirely won; this is why the fashion-conscious woman is sensitive; it is also why some pretty and much-admired women can be sadly convinced they are neither beautiful nor elegant, that this supreme approbation of an unknown judge is exactly what is missing: they are aiming for an in-itself that is unrealizable. Rare are the gorgeous stylish women who embody in themselves the laws of elegance, whom no one can fault because they are the ones who define success or failure; as long as their reign endures, they can think of themselves as an exemplary success. What is unfortunate is that this success serves nothing and no one.
Clothes immediately imply going out and receptions, and besides, that is their original intent. The woman parades her new outfit from place to place and invites other women to see her reign over her “interior.” In certain particularly important situations, the husband accompanies her on her “calls”; but most often she fulfills her “social obligations” while he is at work. The implacable ennui weighing on these gatherings has been described hundreds of times. It comes from the fact that these women gathered there by “social obligations” have nothing to say to each other. There is no common interest linking the lawyer’s wife to the doctor’s—and none between Dr. Dupont’s and Dr. Durand’s. It is bad taste in a general conversation to talk of one’s children’s pranks or problems with the help. What is left is discussion of the weather, the latest novel, and a few general ideas borrowed from their husbands. This custom of “calling” is tending to
disappear; but the chore of the “call” in various forms survives in France. American women often replace conversation with bridge, which is an advantage only for women who enjoy this game.
However, social life has more attractive forms than carrying out this idle duty of etiquette. Entertaining is not just welcoming others into one’s own home; it is changing one’s home into an enchanted domain; the social event is both festivity and potlatch. The mistress of the house displays her treasures: silver, table linen, crystal; she dresses the house with flowers: ephemeral and useless, flowers exemplify the gratuitousness of occasions that mean expenses and luxury; blooming in vases, doomed to a rapid death, flowers are ceremonial bonfires, incense and myrrh, libation, sacrifice. The table is laden with fine food, precious wines; it means satisfying the guests’ needs, it is a question of inventing gracious gifts that anticipate their desires; the meal becomes a mysterious ceremony. Virginia Woolf emphasizes this aspect in this passage from
Mrs. Dalloway:
And so there began a soundless and exquisite passing to and fro through swing doors of aproned white-capped maids, handmaidens not of necessity, but adepts in a mystery or grand deception practiced by hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when, with a wave of the hand, the traffic ceases, and there rises instead this profound illusion in the first place about the food—how it is not paid for; and then that the table spreads itself voluntarily with glass and silver, little mats, saucers of red fruit; films of brown cream mask turbot; in casseroles severed chickens swim; coloured, undomestic, the fire burns; and with the wine and the coffee (not paid for) rise jocund visions before musing eyes; gently speculative eyes; eyes to whom life appears musical, mysterious.
The woman who presides over these mysteries is proud to feel she is the creator of a perfect moment, the dispenser of happiness and gaiety. She is the one bringing the guests together, she is the one making the event take place, she is the gratuitous source of joy and harmony.
This is exactly what Mrs. Dalloway feels:
But suppose Peter said to her, “Yes, yes, but your parties—what’s the sense of your parties?” all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an offering;… Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of
their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?… An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance … anybody could do it; yet this anybody she did a little admire, couldn’t help feeling that she had, anyhow, made this happen.
If there is pure generosity in this homage to others, the party is really a party. But social routine quickly changes the potlatch into an institution, the gift into an obligation, and the party hardens into a rite. All the while savoring the “dinner out,” the invited woman ponders having to return the invitation: she sometimes complains of having been entertained too well. “The Xs … wanted to impress us,” she says bitterly to her husband. I have been told that during the last war in a little Portuguese city, tea parties had become the most costly of potlatches: at each gathering the mistress of the house had to serve more varied cakes and in greater number than the previous one; this burden became so heavy that one day all the women decided together not to serve anything anymore with the tea. The party loses its generous and magnificent character in such circumstances; it is one more chore; the accessories that make up a party are only a source of worry: you have to check the crystal and the tablecloth, measure the champagne and petits fours; a broken cup, the silk upholstering of a burned armchair, are a disaster; tomorrow you have to clean, put away, put in order: the woman dreads this extra work. She feels this multiple dependence that defines the housewife’s destiny: she is dependent on the soufflé, the roast, the butcher, the cook, the extra help; she is dependent on the husband, who frowns every time something goes wrong; she is dependent on the guests, who judge the furniture and wine and who decide if the evening has been a success or not. Only generous or self-confident women will go through this ordeal with a light heart. A triumph can give them a heady satisfaction. But in this respect many resemble Mrs. Dalloway, about whom Woolf tells us: Although she loved these triumphs … and their brilliance and the excitement they brought, she also felt the hollowness, the sham. The woman can only take pleasure in it if she does not attach too much importance to it; if she does, she will be tormented by a perpetually unsatisfied vanity. Besides, few women are wealthy enough to find their life’s occupation in “socializing.” Those who devote themselves to it entirely usually try not only to make a cult of it but also to go beyond this social life toward other aims: genuine salons have a literary or political side. These women try to influence
men and to play a personal role. They escape from the condition of the married woman. She is not usually fulfilled by the pleasures and ephemeral triumphs rarely bestowed on her and that often mean as much fatigue as distraction. Social life demands that woman “represent,” that she show off, but does not create between her and others real communication. It does not wrest her from her solitude.